


To Every Beloved Stranger

by Sholio



Category: The Magicians - Lev Grossman
Genre: Gen, M/M, Post-Canon, Treat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-13
Updated: 2021-02-13
Packaged: 2021-03-17 19:20:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,076
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28730352
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sholio/pseuds/Sholio
Summary: There was a plague of Near Deer terrorizing some of the outlying farmsteads near the Erroneous Mountains.The mountains were so called because they tended to wander around on maps and in real life, though in different directions in each place. The Near Deer were so called because they were deer that stood on their hind legs. They were creepy as fuck.("Forfuck's sake,Quentin," Eliot had said, the first time he saw one. "Did you have to?")
Relationships: Plum Purchas & Eliot Waugh, Quentin Coldwater & Plum Purchas, Quentin Coldwater/Eliot Waugh
Comments: 5
Kudos: 18
Collections: Chocolate Box - Round 6





	To Every Beloved Stranger

**Author's Note:**

  * For [xslytherclawx](https://archiveofourown.org/users/xslytherclawx/gifts).



Fillory after the reconstruction was different from Fillory before. Or so Plum was told by the others, who would know, and she had no reason not to believe them. It wasn't _worse;_ in fact, in a lot of ways, Eliot said, it was better. It was just different. Weirder. More convoluted and strange, full of things that even Plum could see didn't fit the general aesthetic of the books.

Janet said it was about what you'd expect when you took a prewar-era children's book and ran it through a Millennial imagination. Plum wasn't a hundred percent sure what she meant by that, but she was pretty sure Janet didn't mean it as a compliment.

Anyway, there was a plague of Near Deer terrorizing some of the outlying farmsteads near the Erroneous Mountains.

The mountains were so called because they tended to wander around on maps and in real life, though in different directions in each place. The Near Deer were so called because they were deer that stood on their hind legs. They were creepy as fuck. 

("For _fuck's sake,_ Quentin," Eliot had said, the first time he saw one. "Did you have to?")

They weren't dangerous, or at least they didn't appear to be, any more so than normal deer. No one was entirely sure because no one wanted to get close to them. The rural settlers objected to them because they tended to look in first-floor windows after dark and turn their heads around upside down, which, okay, Plum could understand why this would be a problem.

She and Eliot were dealing with it, in part because none of the others wanted to, but also, Plum still wasn't past her first flush of fascination with the place, and welcomed the chance to see a little more of its outlying regions. The fact that it was markedly different from book-Fillory helped her hold onto her sense of wonder, separating the real Fillory from the specter of Fillory in her head.

Eliot, though. Eliot _loved_ Fillory. Plum wasn't sure if he knew how much he loved it, or how visible and endearing his love was. There was something incredibly charming about the way that Eliot didn't seem to realize how in love with it he was, how he mocked it in the affectionate way of a child for a beloved friend or sibling, and jumped at every opportunity to see a little more of it.

Still, watching Eliot try to reason with a bunch of HR Geiger deer was an experience, standing knee-deep in some kind of dark-green crop she didn't know the name of, at the edge of a field while at least two dozen of the things encroached slowly from the field's opposite side.

Eliot didn't look alarmed. Plum tried to remind herself that she was a magician and if it really came down to it, all she had to do was use a little magic. She worked her fingers, going through the steps of Wigglesworth's Giant Broom and Loughton's Lift just in case she needed them.

"Look, there's lots of uninhabited mountain out there for you," Eliot said, gesturing toward the misty violet-tinted peaks visible above the tops of rolling hills covered with trees. "Do you understand a thing I'm saying—Jesus Christ on a purple dildo!"

He jumped, and so did Plum. There was another phalanx moving in from the side, seven or eight more of the creatures that had seemingly appeared from nowhere, though more likely from the dense brush along the tumbledown stone wall that Eliot and Plum had at their backs. They were incredibly, eerily silent. Plum was pretty sure she hadn't heard them make a single noise yet.

Without needing a consultation, Eliot and Plum scrambled up on top of the wall. From this slightly safer-seeming vantage point, they watched the scattered groups of deer lurch toward them through the field with a hopping Uncanny Valley sort of stride. It was the sort of nearly animatronic movement that reminded a person of late-night B-movies and the phrase "Kill it with fire."

"They're not dangerous," Eliot said, but she couldn't help noticing that he had placed his hands in defensive spell positions as well.

"You're sure of that, are you?"

"They haven't hurt anybody yet."

"Maybe because everyone who saw them had the common sense to run away!"

"Shhh," Eliot said. He was looking toward the trees behind the zombielike advance of the deer.

Plum looked too. They had both been too distracted to notice, but there was something in the forest—something big. It was on the other side of one of the rolling hills surrounding the valley, so they couldn't actually see it, but they could hear crashing and see the tops of the trees thrashing around in a worrying sort of way.

The deer noticed too. In eerie unison, they turned their heads in that direction, front hooves dangling loosely.

"Are there elephants in Fillory?" Plum asked quietly, although she had a feeling they probably weren't that lucky.

"Look at those trees. That's no elephant. A giant?" Eliot murmured. "I haven't seen one since the rebuilding. Hmm. Could be something new."

"Great. And it seems to be heading our way."

She caught glimpses, in the late afternoon sunshine, of something huge and dark, or dark-ish, more of a dark reddish color, rearing above the trees, but that still didn't prepare her for the full sight of it when it lurched out of the trees. It was an enormous _thing_ , like a sort of huge animated chaise lounge or a child's stuffed animal or both at once that had come to life.

The Near Deer bolted like startled rabbits. In seconds, every single one of them had vanished into the woods.

Plum brought up her hands in a defensive curl, halfway through the fireball spell Janet had taught her, but Eliot reached out and caught her arm, pulling her hand down as sparks crackled on her fingertips. He was actually, impossibly ... laughing.

"What is that thing?" Plum whispered frantically.

Eliot patted her arm and jumped off the wall, his royal robes flaring around him. "Q?" he yelled. "Is that you up there?"

He laughed again, and Plum noticed for the first time that there was one—no—two small figures on its back waving at them. One of them was shouting something back. They were still too far away, and too high, for Plum to catch the words, but there was no mistaking the flash of that shock of white hair.

She laughed too, flicked her fingers to banish the remains of the spell, and jumped down off the wall. By the time she caught up, the enormous thing had settled in the middle of the field, curling its legs under it in a peculiarly bendy sort of way. It was like a huge plush hill that had spontaneously mushroom-sprouted out of the ground.

"You found a fucking Cozy Horse," Eliot yelled up its side. "Of course you did. Only you, Q."

The small figure of Quentin gave the other one—Alice, it had to be Alice—a hand down the great animal's side, or at least he tried to, but she slipped over the side without giving him a chance, so he slid after her. They both coasted recklessly down the Cozy Horse's side like children on a sledding hill. Alice plopped neatly to the ground and brushed her long skirt down. Either Eliot had moved to intercept Quentin, or Quentin had actually aimed for him, because he tumbled off the Cozy Horse's giant plush flank directly into Eliot's embrace. Eliot, still laughing helplessly, actually managed to pick him up and spin him around, which was an achievement with someone as tall as Quentin.

"God, it's good to see you," Quentin said. He was grinning his head off. "Both of you." 

Eliot kissed him—on the side of the mouth, not full on the lips, but that didn't manage to make it any less intimate. Then he let Quentin go, and Quentin hesitated and reached for Plum's hand, but she said, "Screw it," and hugged him. He gave her a sort of hesitant but heartfelt little hug back.

Alice and Eliot were having some kind of moderately awkward reunion in the background. Alice gave Plum a little smile, and Plum returned it over Quentin's shoulder, or more like past his armpit.

"So where in the hell did you two come from?" Eliot asked.

"We'll tell you everything," Quentin said. He let Plum go and took a deep breath. "But first ... I don't suppose you have something to drink? I feel like my mouth is full of road dust." He gave the Cozy Horse's side a casual pat. "She's great to ride on, don't get me wrong, but you are pretty high up there, and there's a _lot_ of dust."

Eliot passed him a flask that appeared from somewhere in his robes. "There's like two swallows left in there," he said, "but if you need something more substantial, there's an entire village right through those trees and we just saved them from a plague of zombie deer, so I expect they ought to be willing to show some gratitude. A roast beast, some dancing boys, at the very least a halfway decent bowl of mutton stew."

Despite the casual tone, he was grinning with a wild, incandescent happiness. In a place like this, Plum thought, where magic was woven into the warp and weft of the world, joy like that should have _done_ something, burst flowers from the ground around his feet or unleashed a flight of balloons from the treetops.

Maybe it had. She still didn't know exactly how this place worked, and Eliot, as High King, was tied into it in a way she didn't begin to understand. Maybe somewhere else in Fillory, in some place with a name like the Sea of Copper or the Nictitating Reaches, there was a garden bursting into luxurious bloom right now, or a warren of rabbits developing butterfly wings and the ability to sing in perfect twelve-part harmony, a tangible manifestation in the world of Eliot's delight.

***

The villagers threw a party for them, a sort of village fête. Plum would have felt bad about this, since they hadn't actually _done_ anything, except that she'd been around long enough to have figured out by this point that Fillorians would party down at the drop of a hat.

The Cozy Horse stayed in the field, but it seemed happy there. Quentin sent some villagers out with a few bathtubs of grain.

Around a blazing bonfire, as a velvet-soft dusk settled over the village and stars came out to compete with the snapping sparks in the sky, Quentin explained about the new corridor to Fillory from Earth, and he and Alice—but mostly Quentin—talked about the places they'd been in Quentin's new land.

"—like Fillory," Quentin was saying, "only more so, I guess. We found a whole forest of what I'm pretty sure are spaceship trees, though we couldn't stick around to see if they ever took off, and this one place that Alice called the House with a Cock in Its Walls—"

Alice smiled demurely.

"Now that sounds like somewhere I'd want to visit," Eliot said.

"No, you don't," Quentin and Alice said together. They paused and glanced at each other, and Quentin went on, "Anyway, there was also a funhouse-mirror kind of place, where everything twists around—remember _Labyrinth?_ With David Bowie? If you go deep enough in that place you can meet doppelgangers of yourself if you really want to, which I also don't recommend by the way. And there's this forest with trees like mushrooms that all fold up like umbrellas at night, but then for part of their life cycle they go sort of _crazy_ and pull up their roots and start hopping around, to spread their seeds, I guess, or spores or whatever—"

"You have a worrying mind sometimes, Q," Eliot said, draped on his shoulder. 

At some point in the evening, Alice slipped off. She didn't say goodbye; she was just there and then gone. Plum had no idea whether she was gone for good or not. No one else seemed to notice.

She herself was starting to feel slightly restless, a little bit out of place. The party seemed a bit too much all of a sudden, the wine too cloying. Maybe that was what Alice had felt too.

She hung in there for a while after Alice left, but eventually she picked up a clay cup of wine and wandered away from the bonfire. She walked through the village's twisting streets and out into the flat darkness of the surrounding fields. She wasn't sure where she was going or why. It occurred to her in a vague sort of way that she might encounter creepy deer-things outside the village proper, but she wasn't _that_ worried. They had left in the manner of creatures who didn't have any particular interest in returning for a while, and frankly she couldn't blame them.

She left the half-drunk clay cup of wine on a fence post and picked her way down a country lane with a stone wall on one side and a dark hillside on the other, rearing up against the stars.

"Plum?"

She looked around in surprise. It was Quentin, his hair a glimmer in the starlight. He caught up to her, hands shoved in his pockets.

"What are you doing here?" she asked. She was going to make a crack about his adoring public, but didn't really have the heart. He hadn't been back in Fillory in ages—well, months on this side anyway; no telling how much time had passed on Earth, or in Quentin's land. From the way he had been talking about it, it sounded like he and Alice had been wandering around for years. 

She wondered if he was looking for Alice, but then he said, "I haven't really had a chance to talk to you yet. It seemed like it'd be easier away from other people. I can leave if you want to be alone."

"No, it's okay. It was all just feeling like ..." She shrugged. "A lot."

"Yeah," Quentin said with a half-laugh, lifting one shoulder in an almost shy half-shrug. She felt a ghost of that old feeling from Brakebills, something that was not quite a crush and not hero worship exactly, a sort of soft warmth for him. "How are you adjusting to Fillory?"

"I was doing better before the creepy deer came along."

Quentin laughed. "There are a few bugs in the system. Hey, stop a minute."

Plum stopped. "What?" she asked, worried that she was about to walk into something dangerous.

"I just wanted to know, since we're out here anyway ..." Quentin gestured up, and abruptly Plum realized that what she had mistaken for a hillside, in the warm soft dusk ... wasn't. "—do you want to ride the Cozy Horse?"

"Of _course_ I do," Plum said.

They scrambled up. It was surprisingly easy to climb, the tufted velvet providing adequate handholds. It felt to Plum as if it had a small knot every so often, the kind you might find in the ornamental upholstery of an old sofa, to provide purchase. Once they got up on its back, though, it was nice and soft and plush.

"Wow," she said, flopping back. "This is really comfortable."

"I know, right?"

She had expected to have more worry about falling off, but it was wide and cushy and very nearly flat. Plum thought immediately of the sky bison on _Avatar: The Last Airbender,_ and was about to ask Quentin if he'd seen it when she realized that he probably had not, because if he had, this thing might suddenly remember that it could fly, and she wasn't sure she wanted that.

Instead she lay on her back and looked up at the strange stars of Fillory. 

Fillory had stars that were more like a painting of stars than the faint little pinprick dots back home. Fillory had special-effects stars, unbelievably vivid and bright, with swirls and whorls of slightly brighter and darker bits that might be nebulae or galaxies or, for all she knew, unevenness in the velvet curtain around the planet that let the light show through. Janet had once started trying to tell her that the stars of Fillory weren't really stars in the "tiny distant suns" sense of Earth ("I know," she had said with solemnity that was unusual for Janet, "because I saw them fall.") but Plum had stopped her. She liked the Fillorian stars and she didn't want to know too much about them. It was the same way that, for example, knowing too much about the author of a famous series of classic middle-grade books could ruin them for you.

Quentin was quiet and calm, a very peaceful person to watch stars with. Plum got the impression that he was enjoying them the same way she was, with a heartfelt and uncomplicated enjoyment.

"Are they different from this, the stars?" she asked. "In your new land?"

"Very," Quentin said, and didn't elaborate.

It occurred to Plum that when she lay very still like this, she could feel the Cozy Horse breathing, a deep and gradual rise and fall of the enormous rib cage underneath her. (It _must_ have ribs, surely? And bones, in general?) It seemed to breathe on the time-scale of the stars, an almost imperceptible change of orientation of her comfortable perch, the way that the constellations moved slowly throughout the night.

If it got bored, lying here among trees that were more like bushes at its size, the Cozy Horse gave no sign. It might have had nothing better to do than lie here all night, providing an enormous, comfortable seat for two people to watch the stars.

It was, in fact, the one thing in Fillory that acted like it knew that it was supposed to be in a children's book, which made Plum instinctively distrust it.

"Where does it come from?" she asked quietly. "The Cozy Horse?"

"Uh ... not sure," Quentin said. He adjusted himself beside her, rolling over to prop himself up on one elbow. His hair was a pale blur in the starlight. "I don't think anyone knows. Everyone thought it was mythical."

"There are mythical creatures in a fantasy land?"

"Well, by everyone I mean me and Eliot and Janet and et cetera."

"Ah."

"But here it is," Quentin said. He patted the Cozy Horse's plush back.

There was a pleasant nighttime silence that lasted until Eliot's voice called up from below, "Hello the horse! Is this where you got off to, Q?"

"And Plum," Plum called down.

"Oh, party on the Cozy Horse, is it? And no one invited me?" Eliot didn't bother climbing; it was probably too pedestrian an activity for the High King of Fillory. He appeared a moment later, bobbing on the verdant breeze, and dropped on the broad plush back beside Quentin.

Quentin propped himself up on his elbows. "Hi," he said.

"Hi," Eliot said, and flopped down with his head on Quentin's stomach. It was gentle and intimate. Plum hadn't really been sure, back at the fire, not entirely, but she was sure now, even though she hadn't actually even seen them kiss yet except for that sort-of-kiss earlier. "Alice is gone, by the way."

"I know," Quentin said. His voice was quiet and contemplative. Still propped on one elbow, he ran his hand through Eliot's hair. "She does that. She might be gone for good now that we're back in Fillory. I'm not really sure what she's looking for, but maybe she'll find it here." He added abruptly, "We haven't done anything, you know, since the—Since. You know. I don't think whatever was there before came back with her."

Eliot reached up and laced his fingers through Quentin's. "Q?"

"Yeah?"

"Shut up. Looking at the stars, are we?" He stirred himself, pointing. "There's a comet up there, just past those two bright stars."

They looked at the stars for a bit more, and eventually Plum began to feel like a bit of a third wheel. They weren't doing anything to make her feel that way, at least not overtly, but Quentin was still idly petting Eliot's hair and it seemed to her that she had overstayed her welcome. She was starting to feel those glasses of wine. And there was a bed waiting for her back in the village.

"You don't need to go," Eliot said sleepily as she leaned over the edge of the Cozy Horse's back.

"It's okay," Plum said. She strained her eyes, trying to make out anything in the black murk beneath her. For all she knew, it could be a hundred feet down with a pitchfork at the bottom.

"Just start to slide," Quentin said, his voice lazy and content. "I know, it sounds dangerous, but it's really not. You just kind of let go and pick up speed."

"I bet this is easier when you're twelve," Plum muttered, and pushed off.

As she slipped over the side of the Cozy Horse, she was aware of a slight movement out of the corner of her eye that, in the dim starlight, she didn't fully register until she was already out of sight and gliding down the weirdly cushiony velveteen flank: it had been Quentin bending over to kiss Eliot. It was slow and gentle and she was all of a sudden glad that she had left them to themselves.

***

In the morning, the Cozy Horse was gone from the field, and mist lay draped like tufts of cotton candy between the trees and across the almost cloyingly picturesque stone walls. The mountains had wandered off too, a bit to the west, looking hazy and very far away.

Alice found Plum as she was saddling one of the two horses she and Eliot had ridden out on. She'd figured that she would just turn the other one loose; they were both talking horses and it could follow along if it wanted or go home if it had a home to go to.

Now she found herself looking down at Alice from the back of her placid mare. Alice's hair was tied back loosely, with some strands escaping and a few pieces of hay in it. Her gray sweater and skirt looked amazingly out of place in Fillory, sort of librarian-ish.

"They're not gone for good," Alice said.

"I know," Plum said, raising both eyebrows at her. (She had never mastered the art of raising just one.) "Eliot would never leave the kingdom in the lurch, for one thing. It's not in him."

Alice made a sound that was sort of like a memory of a laugh. "You should have known him back in Brakebills. You wouldn't believe how he's changed."

She looked around and then pulled herself up onto the second horse—Eliot's horse, a suitably kingly black charger. She didn't bother with a saddle, just sat on its back with her skirt spread across its withers and draped over its haunches.

"What are you doing?" Plum said.

"Going with you, I suppose," Alice said. She had a strange, flat, affectless voice, like some of her emotional nuances still weren't quite there yet. "I'd like to see more of Fillory. It has been ..." She hesitated. "A long time since I was here."

The weird thing was that Alice still looked about Plum's age. Plum hadn't really noticed it, as such, back on Earth, but here in Fillory it really stood out, especially after spending all that time with Alice's former peers back at Whitespire.

"Anywhere you want to go?" Plum asked. "There's a centaur commune just to the north of here, but they're kind of raging assholes. And there's a friendly sphinx a day's ride to the south who sometimes tells the future in riddles if you bring her a joke she likes. So far I haven't gotten a very interesting fortune, but I've found that she's a pushover for a good Monty Python routine."

"To be honest I haven't found much value in futures," Alice said.

"Oh."

"But I do know a lot of Monty Python." And Alice smiled, a little unpracticed as if she was still finding her way around the edges of it, but genuine.


End file.
